


and the water, faintly falling

by captainparakeet



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Found Family, Gen, T6T Fix-it, alternate timeline where mary didn't die, because what the hell is that episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-17 06:44:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9309980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainparakeet/pseuds/captainparakeet
Summary: She didn’t get the happily-ever-after. But happiness came to her in smaller ways.





	

 

Sometimes, she missed the smell of gunpowder and life on the run. That knife-edge tension. When it happened, she went for a jog, down to the seaside. She stripped off her sneakers without undoing the laces. Warm water reaching for her toes, curling around the soles of her feet. She looked far into the horizon, the distant line between the deep black blue and the stars, and she reminded herself of the line dividing her old life and the new, and the vow to never, ever go back. 

 

* * *

 

Rosie is her gravity. Cheeky face and gurgling noises and far-too-clever eyes that reminded her of Sherlock. If genetic traits could be inherited through osmosis, through skin-to-skin closeness of uncle and niece, through baritones patiently laying out the foundational principles of deduction to a pair of big, baffled eyes, Rosie was the evidence.

“She’s exceedingly observant, for her age,” Sherlock said, his voice aiming for neutral, though his eyes beamed with pride.

They could never hide anything from Rosie. Not the biscuit tin where her favourite cookies were kept, nor the Russian puzzle set that was supposed to be a secret till her birthday, or the secret jar of maggots that she had rather morbidly grown attached to.

“With early training—“

“Sherlock,” she said. He pouted. But she let him read to Rosie, even though he had a way of spinning Dora the Explorer stories into Dora the Detective, with a couple nice murders thrown in to supplement the “dull narrative.”

 

* * *

 

When it was all over, the only thing she could feel was a dull ache, like looking at a particularly beatiful view from a distance – through the rearview mirror. There wasn’t any great drama, considering.

John told her about the woman he met on the bus. He looked defeated, like carrying the secret had weighed down his small shoulders. She wondered if he felt relief, letting it all out. It was raining then, soft and quiet, and she looked out the window for a long time, thinking of how she’d gotten used to this, the quietness, and she must’ve sat there for a very long time without speaking a word because he’d already left when she came to herself again.

For a while, they carried on with their rituals; morning coffee, Rosie’s doctor appointments, her driving him to work while talking about the government going tits up; more NHS cuts; Sherlock’s cases; playdates for Rosie. Normalcy became an addiction.

She wasn’t angry. Perhaps she should. Perhaps she would, if she hadn’t expected it, long before it came knocking. She was too much of a realist to believe in happily-ever-after, after all that, after Magnussen, after AGRA. Marriage was a ledger, and they’d started out with a debt on her side, one that could never be balanced out.

Still, it stung. _The problems of your future are my privilege_. He had meant it too; she knew he meant it. She had looked into his eyes then, the conviction in it.

Well, John had always been a romantic.

They made their best go at it. Five whole months, almost six. But the heaviness in his eyes became hers too, blanketing the air around them like layers of fog. They could have stayed in that equilibrium forever, dancing in smaller and smaller spaces, holding unto the safety blanket of normalcy. But she knew that was no way of living. 

 

* * *

 

Sherlock found out three weeks in. After dinner with Mrs Hudson and Molly, he manoeuvred her out the door with some half-hearted explanation of needing her expertise for a case.

They walked and walked until questions tumbled out of his mouth in disarray, uncharacteristic of him. It was freezing as they stood outside a 24-hour kebab place, her hands buried deep in the pockets of her coat. He fiddled with his cigarette, stole a glance at her direction. 

It occurred to her that he was struggling with this, the smudge in his perfect little image of them. A family worth living and dying for. In some ways, Mary thought with some compassion, he was very young.

“Everything is transient,” she said.

“You sound like Mycroft.”

“Oh, to be the one to run the free world.”

“Would you want to?”

She fell silent. Once she’d glimpsed the view from top, where lives of thousands were little more than tiny specks to erase and redraw to an ideal image. She had seen it all, what it could do to someone’s head, and she’d flinched.

“No,” she said. This place – small, broken, imperfect – is where she belonged.

 

* * *

 

 

They made arrangements, awkwardly and meticulously, spreading Rosie between them. She made copies of keys –one for Molly, one for Sherlock, one for Mrs Hudson. She quit her nursing job and took in more translator gigs, turning half of the kitchen into a makeshift office. The kitchen counter was filled with binders and references. She let Sherlock keep some of his experiments in one of the top cabinets, with smiley post-it reminders to clear out the materials once a week.

On Saturday mornings, she’d come in, fresh from a grocery run, to the smell of freshly baked cookies – Mrs Hudson – and Molly on the sofa, bouncing Rosie up and down, looking bored to death by the cartoon on the telly. Sherlock, being helpful by not being helpful, pacing the floor barefooted and rattling off stream-of-consciousness word soup, sometimes in Latin – body parts in various stages of decomposition, poisons, the best schools for Rosie.

They watched the Great British Bake-off re-runs together. She let him deduce the contestants, only correcting him when he erred (“look at the indentation of her wrist and lower arm; her body awareness. She’s a server at a fine dining restaurant -" / “She was. She already left. About three weeks now.” / “How do you—oh, _obvious_.”) What’s obvious: he enjoyed it far more than he let on.

Sometimes it was just her and Rosie. She used to dread this, how it made her feel like a fraud, exposed. But when she rocked her to sleep she could hear those heartbeats, Rosie’s tiny fingers brushing her cheeks, her hair, and she felt undone, unmoored, the waves gathering all around her.

 

* * *

 

“You look like someone who’s lived many lives.”

Somehow, the pick-up lines floating her way felt like call-outs. Men who sidled up to the adjacent seat at the bar, sent her drinks, tried to pick up her tabs. The attention was flattering but it made her feel exposed, and all she wanted was to withdraw, to be invisible.

Eventually, she started dating again, slipping into the ritual like a pair of old shoes everyone kept shoving into her feet. A text from Sherlock to come to a posh restaurant off Parliament Square, a tablecloth affair and a client he ‘needed her intuition to read’. A colleague of Molly, red-cheeked, far too young for her, too eager to please. Acquaintances of Mrs Hudson (“he’s widowed but very nice, dear, he could go on forever about archeology if you let him”).

Nothing much came of it. Sometimes she enjoyed the conversations, the getting-to-know-them dance, but she knew she could never open all her cards, all her past. To go a step further is to surrender, and she can’t close her eyes and free-fall, not again.

 

* * *

 

Rosie’s first word, when it came, bubbling about her mouth, was almost too soft to hear. There’s the ‘o’, round and clear at the beginning. The rest was all garbled up.

“O…wess?” Molly sat on the floor in the living room, cross-legged, her eyes level with Rosie’s. Her mouth hung open. She blinked. “Oh.”

Ob-vious. Mary supposed there were worse words out there.

“S _herlock.”_ Molly glared at him. Sherlock’s expression was set on neutral, but he couldn’t quite mask a hint of smugness.

 

* * *

 

 

Her life took on familiar rhythms. There were normal, stay-in nights – old movies and Mrs Hudson’s homely Italian cooking and Molly dropping by with take-outs and casework from Bart’s, all of them taking turns watching Rosie, the low murmur from the kitchen of _the formaldehyde was a red herring_ and I _inspected his intestines three times; I’m not bloody doing it again,_ and _he must’ve been chopped liver,_ coming in and out like gentle waves.

There were nights where everything accelerated, the air serrating her lungs with the spell of autumn, the fire in her veins swirling, throbbing, the plots turning in dizzying tides – secret societies, ancient codes in half-forgotten languages, a plot to poison the water nicked at the last minute.

On Sundays, mostly, she was alone with the work that paid her bills, translating pages and pages of legalese in one language to the other, fussing over elaborate phrasings that could’ve meant a million dollars’ worth of difference, trying to call her client and her client’s lawyers at three a.m so she could reach them at noon, going over every line, unknotting every ambiguity, every bit of hemming and hawing, Rosie watching her with curious eyes.

 

* * *

 

“Why baking?”

It was a quiet morning, every sound amplified – the kitchen drawer opening, the whistle of the water kettle. The light was pale, blue-ish, and her eyelids were heavy with sleep when she found him sitting on the armrest of the sofa. He needed to borrow her book on the history of sign languages, he said. A fib. Nightmare? Likely.

Then they sat in the kitchen, with their cups of coffee and a bowl of biscuits, a half-successful experiment. It was sweet and lightly burnt along the edges. It crumbled with every bite.

She watched him wipe the flakes from the corner of his mouth like a child. Home, she thought. It felt like this.

She turned the question back at him. “What do you think?”

His eyes lit up. He liked the idea of being able to read her. Well, he could always hope. “You like the precision. Mathematics. The science of making the right calculations, measuring every element, putting every variable in place. Then,” he clasped his hands together. “The perfect outcome.”

She smiled. “I’m not your brother, Sherlock.”

“No,” he agreed. His slim fingers, tracing the rim of the cup. “You’re better.”

She threw him a fond smile. “Flattery’s not going to get you out of grocery duty.”

“Come on, Mary.”

 

* * *

 

She was more sentimental than he would’ve believed. Than anyone has ever believed. Baking was her way of remembering. Hazelnut and vanilla, the scent of Prosecco staining Ajay’s starched-white shirt, stealing clandestine dinners in between missions, the bitterness of stolen endings. The sharp, tart lemon slices – those afternoons spent peeling off leathery rinds beside her mother, a woman whose face she barely remembered. Salted pistachio, walnuts, baked kufta—the places that seduced her and chewed her out, when she was one of a team, powerful and drunk on adventure. A damp fish pie shared for two with plastic forks, a sad little lunch with a sandy-haired man who wore despair around his eyes, the eyes she fell in love with, once. Sugary rhubarbs, Mrs Hudson’s favourite; honey and butter that smelled like Molly on Saturdays; the smell of ginger that clung to Sherlock’s coat from time to time. All of it, her memories. The things she never got to keep, all she was ever afraid of losing, what she had already lost.

 

* * *

 

The first time she brought Rosie to the beach, she couldn’t wait to get into the water, her rolled-up pants soaking wet, her pirate hat already askew. The waves raced up to Rosie’s knees and she to them, eager to know each other. For a moment her body tensed – her mind painted the image: Rosie, so small, swallowed up. All that unpaid blood debt catching up to her.

But there was Rosie, laughing, giggling, alive. There was nothing to fear. She stepped closer to the water.

 

**Author's Note:**

> My fantasy happy ending for Mary was almost the same as the one I always wanted for Sherlock. An independent life, a spoonful of excitement and a lot of peace, an imperfect life full of imperfect people who love and surround her like a satellite while allowing her to be her unknowable self. So this is a wish fulfilment, sort of, because T6T wasn't a fair ending for her. Sherlock and Mary is one of my favourite friendships in the show, with all its jagged edges and odd comforts, and I hope that love shows here. 
> 
> I wrote this soon after T6T. Certain plotlines have been jossed / glossed over since then, but let's pretend that the cheating happened but the aquarium didn't (or did, but with a different outcome where nobody died).


End file.
